Month: February 2002

Cruciverbalists run amok? The New Yorker has an interesting story about crosswords and the people what love ’em:

Joshua Kosman, a classical-music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, is a typical attendee. “The past fifteen years, for me, has been a process of sinking into, codifying, and coming to terms with the fact that this is what I do. That I’m a puzzle guy,” he told me. Then he cut to the chase: “Did you know that Britney Spears has signed a big endorsement deal with Pepsi? That’s right, it’s true, and we are all very happy about it. You see, ‘Pepsi-Cola’ is an anagram of ‘Episcopal’ and ‘Britney Spears’ is an anagram of ‘Presbyterians.’ ” He paused to let this sink in, but my reaction wasn’t quite what he had hoped for. “Yeah, I know,” he said. ” ‘Episcopal’ is singular, and ‘Presbyterians’ is plural. But we take what we can get.”

Found through Arts & Letters Daily.

The music on Dell’s tech support hotline seems to change every time I call, and the uninterrupted ’80s pop of Sunday night — yes, little friends, video killed the radio star — gave way last night to some strange blend of quasi-classical elevator music, interrupted every half-minute with a “thank you for your patience” and “all our representatives are busy helping other customers.” It could have been worse; they could have been playing John Ashcroft’s greatest hits. And I suppose there are worse things to find yourself doing than deleting the contents of your hard drive and then reformatting it, but if there are, I don’t want to know about it. Typing “format c:” and hitting enter is nerve-wracking enough for one evening, thank you very much. I think I managed to salvage the more important files before the big purge, although I lost a lot of digitial photographs and some of the software I need to upload them, and I’ll need to talk to my cable modem provider about what software I need to reinstall from them, since nobody there ever sent me a CD or disk.

There are days when just about everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and the only thing that makes days like that bearable is the knowledge that it’s probably not your fault. Part of me would like to talk about it here, but I’m not going to, because it’s not that big a deal, and because stories like this (found through Metafilter) remind me why I try not to talk about my job where the wrong people might be listening.

But in other news…I’ve been toying with the overall look of this weblog, especially with regard to the sidebar on the left, and I’d welcome any comments or suggestions. Only recently, I found out this page wouldn’t load at all in Netscape, and I think I’ve remedied that, but if something looks off, please let me know. And now, I’m off to see how much cheesy ’80s music Dell tech support can make me listen to this time before they finally help me fix my home computer.

Okay, now the spammers are just trying to confuse me. “Mike,” writes the nonexistent alancrooks@ns1.ehost2102.com, “Thanks again for lunch it was great! Best regards, Steve”. Um…right. Frankly, I think I liked it better when they were trying to sell me something.

Then again, even Amazon, who I know is trying to sell me something, is starting to sound a lot like spam and can’t even bother to get their details straight. “Your birthday is right around the corner –” they tell me, “March 28, to be exact.” Um, no…it’s on the 26th actually. Has been for years. Says so right on the wishlist you’re asking me to update. Why exaclty you thought I would want to add this, I don’t know. But why don’t you and my good friend Steve discuss it over lunch?

Well now, this is interesting:

postcardX attempts to accentuate the randomness and instantaneousness of human connection. it tries to break down social barriers with well-loved packages of self unleashed upon an unknowning receipient. it tries to give moments of happiness, wonder, and wow! (which may extend into life-long relationships) by the simple act of giving gifts of self.

Found via harrumph. I’m considering joining up.

And because I think this is interesting, too: “I am Google! I find many good things.” Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford.